Digital Content and Business – Systemic Lessons Learned

Every brand is a media company. This is a huge take away from our friends at Hyphen-Italia at their event yesterday on Omnichannel Digital Production Management. No matter what kind of a business you are today, you must produce digital content that can be published on multiple channels. When you consider that over 80% of commercial transactions are generated by a digital experience  and that Google says smartphone users spend 177 minutes per day on their phones, it becomes clear that without a digital dimension there can be no economic sustainability for businesses today. Whatever the product is, there has to be a digital version of it. No digital content, no business.

A systemic solution

Hyphen  have been supplying digital solutions for top brands for years. We’ve known Hyphen for nearly 20 years, ever since they first took an interest in our systemic approach to management. It has always been clear to the CEO, Stefano Righetti, that to design effective solutions for the digital transformation challenges that his customers face, Hyphen must have clearly in mind that companies are interconnected systems. This thinking has allowed them to create ways for businesses to manage their digital content in a smooth flow that eliminates the unnecessary parallel processes that happen in so many companies.

The Hyphen solution is based on six pillars that every company needs to manage in the Digital Age:

1. Digital Identity of the product
2. Editorial process of the product
3. Digital Library
4. Integration of the Digital Supply Chain with the Product Supply Chain
5. Centralized management of a “Content Factory”
6. Media and Production Planning Management

You can read a whole chapter by Stefano Righetti called ‘Interweaving the Product Supply Chain with the Digital Supply Chain to Improve Business Performance and Competitiveness’  in our Founder Dr. Domenico Lepore’s new book Moving the Chains: An Operational Solution for Embracing Complexity in the Digital Age

The paradigm of flow

What’s fascinating for us at Intelligent Management is to see that the message we’ve been bringing to businesses since we started in 1996 is even more relevant today. The more we understand about Digital Transformation, the more obvious it becomes that it requires a paradigm shift and a mindset of speed of flow. Whatever gets in the way of flow prevents a company from competing. So the best ally of any business today is a whole system mindset where silos have no place. In other words, the Digital Age is practically forcing companies into behaviours that are more systemic.

Systemic challenges

It’s unfortunate that the word “systemic” is mostly used in negative contexts, like systemic illnesses or systemic failures. This is mainly because we still live in a world where organizations are predominantly built and managed mechanically as separate parts/departments/functions. The assumption is that this is the best way to “control” what goes on. This is a problem because Digital Transformation is accelerating all of our interactions.

Systemic organization design and management is still not a mainstream concept. This has to change and it has to change fast – only by designing and managing  operations seamlessly and systemically will companies speed up, keep up and thrive.

 

DR. DOMENICO LEPORE’S NEW BOOK AVAILABLE NOW!

Leaders and managers are facing unprecedented change in the Digital Age. To compete they must shift to a systemic mindset and way of conducting operations. We work alongside CEOs and Executive Teams to support the shift towards more effective, systemic strategy and operations. Our books include ‘Deming and Goldratt: The Decalogue‘, ‘Sechel: Logic, Language and Tools to Manage Any Organization as a Network’, ‘The Human Constraint‘, ‘Quality, Involvement and Flow: The Systemic Organization’ , and now ‘Moving the Chains: An Operational Solution to Embrace Complexity in the Digital Age‘ .We support our international clients through education, training and the Ess3ntial multi-project software using Critical Chain to schedule competencies and unlock the potential of human resources. Based on our proprietary Decalogue methodology.